There are lots of people out there offering readings and channeled messages, and some are better at it than others. To get a good reading, you really ought to come to your own understanding of how divination works. And then you can kind of feel out the providers to decide whether they are approaching this from the same understanding that you are. Knowledge is power.

Briefly: What is Divination?

Divination, according to the dictionary, is “The practice of seeking knowledge of the future by supernatural means.”

Well, that’s off. First, it’s seeking knowledge, period. Not just knowledge of the future, but all sorts of knowledge. Most importantly, knowledge about your own inner being, your own connection, your own baggage, focus, goals, and pathways to reach them.

Second, it’s not “by supernatural means” because there’s no such thing as supernatural. Everything is part of nature, and as such, is natural. Our connection to Source is natural. Not supernatural.

If I wrote a dictionary, I would define divination this way: “Seeking knowledge, wisdom and guidance from the Divine, often with the assistance of tools such as cards, pendulums, runes, and many other items and methods.”

Divination comes from the root word “Divine.” Keep that in mind as you practice.

Here’s How Divination Works

Say you’re a field mouse. You live in a little burrow in the middle of a vast field of lush grasses and wildflowers. You want to take your family to the woods, to find berries and apples, and to the spot where the river has spilled small puddles of sweet clean water into basins just the right size for your family’s drinking and splashing pleasure.

Say you have a best friend, an eagle. A vegetarian eagle who does not eat mice. (Just go with it, it’s a good analogy, I promise.)

As the mouse leaves her burrow, she can only see as far as the tall grasses around her. But the eagle can see the entire meadow. She can see the shortest path to the woods and the water, and she can also see the safest path. She can see every obstacle the mouse might encounter along the way.

So the mouse can either wander in the general direction of what she wants, tripping, falling, running into boulders, cliffs, waterfalls, and snakes along the way — or the mouse can talk to the eagle first.

The eagle can be the mouse’s GPS.

A person who is reading, is getting information directly from the eagle, who can also see forward and backward in time and has access to all knowledge ever learned. The eagle is your Higher Self.

How to communicate with your eagle

Two ways: Meditation and Divination.A lot of people would say prayer, and prayer is great. Prayer is, in fact, a delightful way to talk to the Divine. Meditation and Divination are how you hear the answers.

Developing a meditation practice of your own will plug you into your eagle every morning. You can download everything you’ll need for the day ahead in those few moments of meditation first thing in the a.m. I recommend it highly. If you do this, you will seldom need any help from outside sources to know what your Higher Self has to say to you.

Divination is a little bit different from meditation. It’s more specifically focused, longer in duration, and often is asking your eagle for information for a different mouse. Divination is usually done for others. (Although I divine for myself quite regularly.)

My process

Before divination, I quiet my mind, focus on the person I’m reading for, open my channels, and allow whatever information that person most needs to flow through me.This is possible because my eagle and everyone else’s eagle are parts of one great big bird.

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That is, my Higher Self and everyone else’s Higher Selves are all parts of that which we call God, or Goddess, or Source, or The Universe, or The Whole, or The All. We are all one. And it is through that oneness that any of us can channel wisdom for any other of us. Because that Whole includes everyone who ever lived and everything they ever learned. We can just dip into the well of knowledge and pull out a cup of whatever our client needs to know. But we don’t really have to.

The most important thing for any reader or channeler or diviner to know is that we are not needed.

We all have access

Every human came to earth in this way: A great single consciousness–that being you call God–created a body, and sent a tiny bit of itself into that body with the first breath to experience a physical lifetime. That piece of Goddess that resides in our body is what we call our Soul, but most of us is still non-physical.

So every single human has the ability to quiet her mind through meditation, and raise her vibration by basking in all things good, and connect to her Higher Self, her Bigger Self, her God-Self, without outside assistance.

Prayer, appreciation, joy, meditation, positivity, all these things help us to tune to the wavelength of Source, and once we’ve tuned, we can “hear” everything Source is saying to us.

It’s just a matter of developing the habit of being aligned, of being positive, of taking those 15 minutes a day to meditate, and of practicing PRESENCE. Presence means, stop what we’re doing and bask in the very moment in the very time in the very place where we currently stand. Do that many times a day. Eventually you’ll be doing it most of the day. Eventually, you’ll be present all day, everyday, with only brief ripples in your state of satisfaction. (And those ripples’ purpose is to reveal how we can be even more satisfied, how life can get even better.)

When I do readings…

I always ask for a nice email from the client first, telling me what’s topmost in her mind. If you can nail down where your thoughts are most of the time, you can get a very good idea about the state of your vibration. And it’s not usually what you think it is. Take an honest look at what you’ve been posting about, sharing, talking about, reading about, complaining about, and discussing. What’s the first topic when your best friend calls? What’s waking you up at night with worry? What’s on your to-do list? That’s where your focus is.

(Sidenote: Whatever you are focused on sets your radio dial so that you can only experience things that also match that wavelength. If you want to change your life, you have to change your channel, which means changing your focus.)

Anyway, I read over this email several times. After meditating, I read the email again, this time focusing on answers. The questions and “problems” always point toward the answers and solutions. Always. That’s what they’re for.

Then I shuffle the cards while focusing on the person and reaching for her Higher Self through my Higher Self. Then I deal the cards.

I have a set pattern I use, my personally modified Celtic Cross pattern, This is you, this covers you, this crosses you, etc. Having a framework is very helpful. If a card falls in this spot, it refers to a block between you and your goal, but if it falls in this spot, it’s talking about a blessing or something that can help, etc.

But above all else, the key to reading the cards is to remember that it’s NOT the cards giving me the information.

It’s my connection. It’s Source.

Tarot cards, like every other divinatory tool, are just tricks I use to shut off my chattering, analytical, individual mind, so that my channel can open and I can hear and feel what’s coming to me from Source. The cards are just a tool. They have no power of their own. They’re just ink and paper. It’s the user’s intent that adds the magic.

And this is true of every other form of divination including the Ouija board. There’s nothing evil the board. There’s no evil that can assert itself into your experience. It’s just cardboard. What you do with it is what gives it energy.

Tales from the table

In one reading, I kept getting a name, and I asked the client who it was. It was her ex, who had recently passed and was on her mind. He was eager to let her know he was okay, not mad at her, completely happy, in fact, and more.

In another reading, I found out my granddaughter was pregnant before she even knew she was, and she wasn’t trying, either.

In yet another reading, I meditated outside beforehand, and as I came in for the cards, noticed I was walking in a long, lazy gait, the way really tall slender people sometimes walk. (I am neither of those things.) I mentioned it to the client, who said her daughter, who had passed, had that gait and it was often mentioned, lovingly, among the family.

Even more rewarding are those readings where I do nothing more than help the client shift her perspective just the tiniest bit, and then she writes me a month later saying how much her life has improved as a result. Those are the ones I’m proudest of.

Practice, practice, practice

Opening your channels is just a matter of practicing and finding the methods that work for you.

It took me years and years and more years to find that I could actually meditate. I always said I couldn’t, that my mind was too active and impossible to quiet down. But that’s because it was untrained.

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I tried and gave up in frustration many times. But eventually I stumbled upon (was guided to) a recording that really worked for me. It was the Vortex Meditation Recordings by Abraham-Hicks, the mp4 version, not the CD. (The image is a link. We don’t carry this in the shop YET so I’m sending you straight to A-H to get it.) The version you download has a bonus track on it called “Mostly Music.” And I found that was the track that worked best for me. The other recordings were guided meditations, with a voice talking through most of the 15 minutes. But the Mostly Music one was just that–mostly music, and just enough help to get me into the zone.

After using it for more than a year, I realized I could now meditate without any music at all. I focus instead on white noise—a stream, a fountain, a ticking antique clock, the hum of an air conditioner, the steady drone of crickets, the drone of a didgeridoo.

I always set a timer. Otherwise, my brain starts asking if I shouldn’t be working by now. With a timer, I know exactly how long I’m sitting, and I don’t worry about going over. I do 15 minutes. I often wish I’d set it for 20, and sometimes if it goes off and I’m not ready I just shut the alarm down and keep going a bit longer.

Sometimes I feel done about halfway through. You get to understand your feelings and trust them. Trusting them is far harder and takes longer, but it’s the key part of all of it.

Divinatory Methods

TAROT: I love using Tarot, and while I collect decks and have dozens, I tend to use just one the most. The Witches Tarot by Ellen Canon Reed. It’s not a typical deck, is based on the Kabbala or Tree of Life, and it uses the Wands=Air, Swords=Fire associations. (Most decks use Wands=Fire, Swords=Air, but that always felt off to me.)

I intend to start working with some of my other decks to try to add more layers to the readings.

RUNES: Norse legend says Odin hung upside down from the World Tree, Yggdrasil, until he received the runes in a vision. The runes are both a magical system, and an alphabet. Each symbol is a letter.

I’ve studied Runes at a 101 level, and there is a lot more to learn, but for a person who makes a living from the magic of words, this is a powerful system. Putting symbols together to create words, or putting them together to create spells and bind-runes, seems perfectly logical.

SCRYING: To “scry” is to look at a focal point with your eyes until visions take shape. Scrying can be done using any number of methods. Candle flame, crystal ball, black mirror, rippling water (“Where the rippling waters go, cast a stone and truth you’ll know.”) Some drip candle wax or even ink into a cup of water to read the shapes created. Others use tea leaves in the bottom of a cup to discern shapes, signs and symbols. Some read clouds, ocean waves, the behavior of birds and still others, in times gone by, would sacrifice an animal and read signs in its entrails. Grody!

PALMISTRY: Interpreting the lines in someone’s hand to convey knowledge.

PENDULUMS: Hold the pendulum still over an object or person, and when it begins to move, interpret its motions. Some people use pendulums with grids these days, but I’ve never tried this and for some reason, have no desire to. My pendulums tell me yes, no. Girl, boy. Go, don’t go. Good idea, bad idea, etc.

There are countless other methods. It would take a book to list them all. They all have these two things in common.

They have volumes written on how to interpret them.

The only interpretation that matters is your own.

All the meanings, definitions, correspondences are just so you get all focused on looking at the tool for the answer, which distracts your brain enough to shut it the F up, so that your Higher Self can finally be heard over all its noise. It quiets the mind. It adjusts the focus to what you are looking for, and you will ALWAYS find what you are actively seeking.

So that’s how Divination works

Begin your practice today. Prepare yourself by developing a habit of meditation, trying different ways until you find one that works for you. Then begin working with different divinatory tools until one resonates with you.

If you want to get a jump start, book a reading with me. I’ll talk to my eagle, she’ll talk to your eagle, and we’ll take a flight together.

Hey, cool that you’re here. I’m Maggie Shayne and I know about creating for a living. I’m a 23 year veteran of more than 60 novels, 25 novellas, an advice column and two CBS Daytime Soaps. I’ve worked for almost every major publisher in New York. In 2014 I went indie, and wrote and published some more while learning to run my own company.

I’m also a complete spiritual geek. All my life I’ve studied religions in search of “the truth,” only to find it’s something we make up as we go along. I’m a Wiccan High Priestess and Elder, Legal Clergy, Third Degree Reiki healer, Spellcaster, Tarot Card Reader, Omen Seer, half-assed shaman and aspiring yogini.

I’m a philosopher-slash-prophetess. I get insights and understanding when I meditate and then I journal it all, and eventually those insights and visions become my blog posts.

Above all else, I’m an avid student and teacher of The Law of Attraction.

I have figured out how to do this. For real. I have leveraged the most powerful force in the Universe to create the life and business of my dreams, and more is unfolding all the time. I am having so much fun that I can’t keep it to myself.

I want to share with you all the ways I’ve learned to literally create my own reality.

And if you join me here, you’re going to learn how to create yours, too.